Fizz (9 page)

As Pemberton began selling his French Wine Coca for a dollar a bottle, cocaine's reputation was at its peak. A year earlier Austrian ophthalmologist Karl Koller discovered the drug was an effective and revolutionary local anesthetic allowing eye, throat, and nose surgery to be performed on conscious patients. His famous Viennese friend Sigmund Freud was writing about its value as an antidepressant and about his own use of cocaine. Back in America, former president Ulysses S. Grant told the country how he was using cocaine to ease the pain of the throat cancer that would kill him in July 1885, and the Hay Fever Association had declared it their official remedy. There was no shortage of cocaine to buy either. Stores and mail-order businesses offered not just cocaine itself but coca-leaf cigarettes, ointments, and sprays too. All were available for anyone to buy over the counter.

In light of the interest in cocaine, French Wine Coca's launch couldn't have been better timed. By the summer of 1885 Pemberton had sold hundreds of bottles of his coca wine and finally, at the age of fifty-four, his run of bad luck in Atlanta seemed to be over. He relocated his business and his family to a two-story redbrick house on Marietta Street, where he turned the basement into a manufacturing lab and the ground floor into an office and storage room. The top floor became his home. In January 1886 he founded the Pemberton Chemical Company and began work on a new product, one he could sell to the five soda fountains that were now open in Atlanta. What exactly drew Pemberton to making a soda fountain syrup is unclear. Certainly the brisk trade at the fountains would have appealed to
his business sense, but another factor may have been the growing clout of the temperance movement.

The temperance movement had started in 1826 with the formation of the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance in Boston. By the middle of the century it had become a national political force with thousands pledging to abstain from alcohol and hundreds of local campaign groups spread across the country. As the 1850s ended, the states of Maine, Michigan, and Nebraska introduced laws against the production and sale of hard liquor. But as the Civil War approached, political support for the movement evaporated as politicians focused on the issue of slavery. By the time the first shots were fired, temperance had disappeared from the political agenda and the state-level alcohol restrictions were being dismantled.

The temperance movement spent years in limbo before returning with a vengeance in 1873 when Eliza Thompson of Hillsboro, Ohio, gathered a group of women and began holding daily “pray ins” outside drugstores that sold alcohol-laced medicine. After six months of Thompson and her Christian soldiers turning up every day to pray and sing hymns, all but one of the drugstores stopped selling alcoholic medicine to get them to go away. Word of this victory spread, and similar bands of women formed across America. They gathered outside saloons, Bibles in hand, praying for the souls of those within. Some of the saloons went out of business as their customers were driven away; others renounced alcohol and signed the pledge of abstinence. By Christmas 1874 this countercultural movement had organized itself into the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).

Unlike its pre-Civil War predecessors, the WCTU was utterly determined to wean America off alcohol. It presented alcohol as a national evil, arguing that alcohol not only caused alcoholism but also made women prostitutes and men wife beaters. Hundreds of thousands of women joined the WCTU, turning it into the first mass movement of women in American politics.

The temperance message found plenty of support in Fulton County, Georgia, and its county seat of Atlanta. In 1885 the electorate of Fulton County narrowly voted in favor of going dry. The move wasn't a threat to Pemberton's French Wine Coca, since it only shut the saloons, leaving
drugstores free to keep selling their boozy bitters and alcoholic “medicines.” But with local prohibition due to start in July 1886 it is possible that Pemberton feared alcoholic medicines could be next or that he figured soda fountains would pick up most of the regular customers from the bars. Whatever his exact reasoning as prohibition loomed in Atlanta in spring 1886, Pemberton started developing a soda fountain syrup based on the coca leaf that had already fueled his success.

To give his syrup an added punch he added another wonder drug that was getting the medical world all excited: the kola nut. This chestnut-sized seed came from the bean-like pods of a slow-growing West African tree, the most cultivated variety of which,
Cola acuminata,
originated in the lands east of the Volta River that now form Nigeria and the Congo River basin. The kola nut, which ranges in color from dark reds and browns to creamy whites and pinks, had been an important commodity in sub-Saharan Africa for thousands for years and played an extensive role in many African cultures. In some areas a kola nut would be planted with the umbilical cord of newborn children in recognition of a successful birth, and the tree that grew would become the property of that child. It was a feature of social life, used as a gift to welcome friends and guests to the home, and it had medical uses too. Even as late as the mid-1990s in rural areas, it was being used to treat guinea worm and to ease the pain of childbirth. The African trade in kola nuts was so big that by the 1100s the nut had reached Arabia, where doctors wrote of its warming effects and ability to ease stomachache. The stimulant properties of the caffeine and theobromine within the nut also made it a favorite among African armies. Askia Mohammad, the great ruler of the Songhai Empire in the late 1400s and early 1500s who converted his lands to Islam, supplied kola nuts to his armies. In return they helped him turn his kingdom into the largest nation ever seen in West Africa.

So when European explorers began entering Africa in the 1500s, they quickly picked up on people's devotion to this stimulating nut. One sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer reported that “the black population would scarcely undertake any enterprise without the aid of kola.” Later that century kola tree seedlings made their way to Jamaica at the request of Caribbean slave masters who wrote to a trader in Guinea with an urgent plea
for the plant “to avert, as far as practicable, those attacks of constitutional despondency to which … Negroes were peculiarly liable.”

By the late 1800s, the British and French empires had spread the tree to Martinique, Sri Lanka, Zanzibar and beyond, and interest in its medical and military applications was reaching a fever pitch. By 1870, kola was being mixed with sugar and vanilla to produce tonics for the invalid, and in 1880s British soft drink companies, including Schweppes, were selling fizzy kola tonics and kola champagnes. The kola champagne made by London's Pure Water Company even won an endorsement from the
Times
newspaper, then seen as the voice of the British establishment, which informed its readers that the drink was “especially good for keeping the brain clear and active.” The rise of the kola drinks so worried British hot chocolate maker Cadbury that it began running ads to discourage people from drinking the stuff.

The world's militaries were also captivated by the potential of kola in the 1880s. A US Navy medical inspector administered kola paste in hot milk to a thirty-six-year-old woman plagued with an irregular heart beat, fatigue, dyspnea, and headaches, and he reported, “The general condition has materially improved, the heart's action is more regular, and the attacks of dyspnoea and faintness have nearly disappeared. The most characteristic effect seems to have been an immediate relief of a sense of fatigue, a sense of
bien-être
and cheerfulness to which the patient had been long a stranger.” The British military tested kola on soldiers stationed in India and found that it reduced their appetite and thirst while boosting their energy levels. The German War Office was impressed enough with its kola experiments to order thirty tons of the stuff for its troops.

The kola nut buzz wouldn't last. The nut failed to live up to the hype, proving no more intoxicating than two large cups of filter coffee, but in 1886 it was still a wonder drug, so Pemberton mixed it into his cocaine-laced soda syrup. The bitter taste of kola dominated the drink, so he added plenty of sugar to mask it. Eventually he cut the kola back to a trace, replacing it with cheaper synthetic caffeine to either save money or further reduce the bitterness. Next in went citric acid, which gave the drink a pleasing tang similar to that of phosphate sodas. Then more sugar to offset the vinegar-like taste of the acid. Falling back on his Thomsonian know-how, Pemberton
then added a combination of flavoring oils that included vanilla, nutmeg, elixir of orange, lemon, lime, oil of coriander, cinnamon, oil of cassia, and neroli. Finally, to give the drink its dark brown color, he added caramel, a popular coloring among patent medicine makers at least partly because it made it hard for customers to see if an insect or other undesirable object had slipped into the bottle by accident.

In April 1886 Pemberton began testing his new drink on customers of Willis Venable's soda fountain, which was housed within Jacobs' Pharmacy on Peachtree Street just three blocks from the Pemberton Chemical Company building. Venable would report back on customers' reactions and Pemberton would adjust the mix before sending a new batch of syrup for testing. As Pemberton slaved over his essential oils and brass kettle, moving ever closer to the ideal formula for his soda, a man named Frank Robinson knocked on his door.

Born in 1845, Robinson grew up in East Corinth, Maine, and had come to Atlanta with his friend David Doe to launch an advertising agency based around their “chromatic printing press” with its ability to print in color. Advertising agencies were a relatively new concept at the time. The earliest agencies developed on the back of the patent medicine business, which dominated advertising in America to such an extent that it was largely responsible for the rapid growth of US newspapers in the 1800s. Initially the agencies formed to carry out the onerous task of placing ads in the ever-growing sea of newsprint, but as the century progressed they began offering to help businesses write and create their ads too. Robinson and Doe had been pointed in Pemberton's direction by a newspaper reporter whom they asked to help them identify businesses that might be interested in their services. But instead of leaving with the Pemberton Chemical Company as a client, Robinson and Doe became convinced that Pemberton's new coca and kola soda could make a fortune. They put their advertising agency on hold and went into partnership with Pemberton, handing over $6,000 each to buy their way in. Robinson then got his brother and father to shovel an additional $7,000 into the venture. Pemberton's landlord, Edward Holland, also joined the partnership, giving the company its premises in exchange for a share of the business.

By early May 1886 Pemberton had a formula he was happy with, and Robinson and Doe began planning how to sell this novel soda. At Robinson's suggestion the drink was christened Coca-Cola in an alliterative nod to its coca and kola content—despite protests from Venable, who thought it was a difficult name to remember. On Saturday May 29, 1886, the first Coca-Cola ad appeared in the
Atlanta Journal
in a blaze of exclamation marks and rat-a-tat-tat buzzwords: “Coca-Cola. Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating! The New and Popular Soda Fountain Drink, containing the properties of the new wonderful Coca plant and the famous Cola nuts. For sale by Willis Venable and Nunnally & Rawson.” But if Pemberton and his investors expected to reap Hires-like success they were to be disappointed.

Shortly after the drink launched, the stomach and intestinal problems that had plagued Pemberton since his injury at the Battle of Columbus struck again. Pemberton retreated to his bed and, if the later claims of his former associates are to be believed, to the comfort of the painkilling morphine he had become addicted to since the Civil War. With Pemberton bedridden, the Coca-Cola project began falling apart. Atlanta's soda fountains managed to move less than fifty dollars worth of Coca-Cola that summer despite the ads and the heat. Doe lost faith. He packed up the printing press that he and Robinson came to Atlanta with and left to seek his fortune elsewhere.

Robinson, despite his quiet demeanor, was made of sterner stuff. He soldiered on, carefully inking out Coca-Cola's now famous logo by writing its name in Spencerian script, which established itself as the standard handwriting style for American business in the late 1800s thanks to its mix of speed, legibility, and elegance. Robinson felt Coca-Cola's big problem was getting people to try it in the first place. So in spring 1887 he started giving prominent Atlantans tickets they could exchange for two free glasses of Coca-Cola; his goal was to get them talking about it. He also began producing a mountain of advertising materials, including five hundred streetcar signs and more than fifteen hundred posters. By early summer 1887 Robinson's advertising blitz was paying off. Orders poured in not just from the soda fountains of Atlanta but from all across Georgia and even from fountains in Alabama and Tennessee. But just as Coca-Cola began making progress, Pemberton's fading health struck again.

In early July he returned to his sickbed, this time convinced he wouldn't be leaving it again. Desperate for money, Pemberton sold a two-thirds stake in the rights to Coca-Cola to Venable and a patent medicine manufacturer named George Lowndes in exchange for an interest-free loan of $1,200. When Robinson and Holland found out, they felt betrayed and asked local lawyer John Candler to intervene. Candler visited the bedridden doctor, who admitted he had sold the rights but insisted that it was always he who owned them, not the Pemberton Chemical Company. Besides, the cash-strapped Pemberton added, I've got no money, so there's nothing for you to get out of me. Candler informed Robinson there was nothing that could be done to regain the rights.

Meanwhile Lowndes and Venable's Coca-Cola business was struggling. Lowndes had taken on the job of sales only to find that Venable had failed to cook any of the syrup needed to fulfill the orders he had taken. Within a few weeks of working together the pair agreed to sell. In December 1887 they found their buyer in Woolfolk Walker, the salesman for the Pemberton Chemical Company. Walker bought the rights for $1,200, which he borrowed from his youngest sister, persuading her to hand over the money that she and her husband were saving to buy a home.